Thursday, December 12, 2013

The young brunette behind the Apple
store counter swiped my credit card and smiled. “Is this your first Mac?” she
asked.

I started to tell her – but suppressed
the words because they would make me sound like one of THOSE old people– that I’ve
been using an Apple keyboard since about 10 years before she was born. Basically
my entire adult life.

Slice 1: 1984. One small black and white Mac sat on a desk in an airless
newsroom at the University of Arkansas. A hippie in the personal computer world.
It was really just a fancy typewriter – a quicker but not always more
convenient way to string together words. I still carried a reporter’s lined notebook
and a couple of pens.

The newspaper adviser wore
baggy khakis, one of his three velour pullovers and worn brown loafers. He was really old – probably at least 50. His
graying blonde hair was rumpled and too long in the front, often falling across his
eyebrows. There was always something either caught in – or hanging from –
his thick moustache. He kept a black flask in the bottom right drawer of his metal desk.
Journalism students hung out in his office or upstairs in Hill Hall, swapping
stories about university administrators and student senators.

Slice 2: 1986. I met a copy editor in an Oklahoma newsroom. He was
bearded, overweight, grumpy. A temper tantrum from this man could mean that a
trash can got thrown across the newsroom or books were swept violently off of a
desk. Some things got kicked too.

When he met me, a 22-year-old
reporter anxious to show off my knowledge of leads and paraphrased quotes, he
looked over his glasses and let out a grunt-sigh.

“Have you ever used a Mac?” he
asked sullenly.

We spent many Saturday nights discussing
trains and classic cars, eating cheeseburgers and listening to the police
scanner.

From him, I learned how to send clandestine
“intranet” messages to co-workers and how to do everything – well, that was
possible at that time – on a Mac.

Newspapering was still a dirty job,
and I would leave the office with X-Acto knife finger cuts and smelling of wax,
ink and smoke, sometimes at 5 p.m., sometimes at 2 a.m.

Slice 3: 1990. I worked in a sterile, bare office run by a tall, gray-haired physician who wore a dark suit every day and could afford to publish anything
he wanted in a full-color monthly magazine. He was punctilious about the time
sheet. I always finished my work in about two weeks, so there was plenty of
time to write poetry and drink Dr Pepper.

Once, the doc surprised our four-person
staff with a field trip to Braum’s. “Order any kind you want,” he said, waving
his arm toward the ice cream bar. I was thinking chocolate almond and butter
pecan but hesitated, since the double dip cones weren’t the $1.99 special.
He ordered first and asked for a small scoop of vanilla. In a cup.

I used to sneak into the art
director’s office to see the only Mac and, of course, to play with the fountain
pens. The latter proved hazardous and resulted in a tetanus shot.

Slice 4: 1991. A one-bedroom apartment near the campus in
Stillwater. The first Mac I ever owned – a little Classic that weighed 16
pounds and came equipped with four megabytes of memory, a floppy disk drive and
a year of $100 monthly payments. The handy carrying case was a bonus!

Two years working toward a
doctorate meant lots
of time studying in the library, talking about professors over Hideaway pizza and
eating in the car.

As a graduate assistant, I took the class none of the professors wanted – teaching undergraduates in the news writing labs. My adviser said I got the job because nobody in the department
knew how to use the new Macs.

Slice 5: 1993. A classroom
that looked more like a storage room – crammed with Mac Classics and tucked in
among the offices and the real classrooms on the second floor of the building.

I spent most of my time trying to
keep all the computers running at the same time while figuring out how to teach
PageMaker to 20 students who were sitting thigh-to-thigh.

Nobody at the new
instructors’ orientation meetings warned us about the real hazards of teaching.
So, when two female students started pushing and slapping each other in my classroom, I ran out of the room.

Soon after that, I changed my policy to allow students to pick their own group members.

A young couple is meeting with a
wedding planner, discussing candles, flowers, colors, whether to hand out
rice bags or bubble bottles, dresses, location, music, finger food, decorations. (Whew!) A group of college
students is assembling a presentation, looking intently at a shared laptop
screen. (Should I offer advice?) Four moms, strollers parked,
are laughing over Diet Cokes and a plate of blueberry muffins. (Sigh.)

The gray-haired man at the table
next to mine looks frustrated. He’s using a new MacBook Air.

“What do you do when everything
freezes?” he asks.

(Just
so you know, command/option/escape will resolve many issues you may
encounter when using a Mac. Well, the technical issues anyway.)